Scargill

An early start this morning – had to drop Maureen off at the airport as she’s off to see her mum for a couple of weeks, leaving me to look after two lots of cats! Just watch the Russians getting to the Space station in 6 hours – fantastic.

I just received this “In view of the relevance of your professional profile and expertise to ESCO’s work, the ESCO Secretariat appointed you as a member of the Reference Group "ICT service activities". This appointment decision has been endorsed by the ESCO Board.” which means sometime in April I’m off to Brussels for a couple of days. I do hope the weather is nicer there than it is here not that I’ll see much of it buried away in meetings but at least I’ll have a night or two to enjoy there – beer’s nice and I know the centre fairly well now.

Meanwhile the satellite broadband continues to work well, I should say the delays are a little annoying at times but considering our NEXT house starts with 2 meg broadband until some magical upgrade in the future, will make satellite just about essential. This’ll be good as I’ve never tried aligning a dish before and now I’ll have two of them to do!!

So many things to do, so little time, but THIS weekend – I plan to do as little as possible. Didn’t really get a break last week as I was working at the FSB’s conference in Leicester and when I got home on Sunday I had to sort out some last minute videos stuff that we didn’t have time to complete at the venue.  The new Chairmain’s first interview video which I did with him the morning after his election is at the FSB website for those who are interested – along with the Toyah Wilcox video and a ton of other stuff..

Got my new laptop so I’ve no doubt I’ll spend most of the weekend populating it and trying to get rid of the new STUPID and almost universally hated Windows 8 gesture controls which result in applications swapping in front of your eyes seemingly randomly.

If I’d not already installed a ton of stuff I’d rip the lot out and go back to Windows 7 but I guess one has to move on… the time will come when Windows 7 is now longer supported so may as well be ahead of the pack.

But for now – some TV and a bite to eat…  have a nice weekend, all.

The highlight of the week for me has to be having met Toyah Wilcox – amazing experience. She was about to go live on stage at the FSB Annual Conference… and we met up in the holding room first for introductions. Amazingly pleasant and despite crutches due to an injury she put the effort in to give us some decent photos…

As IT Director it is my job at our conferences to ensure our presence on the web includes topical reporting, imagery, video and this year – social media.

On the social media front it is our first shot at doing this properly at one of our conferences and everything worked wonderfully well, with nice comments coming in throughout.

The delegates (several hundred) arrived on Thursday for the AGM (in which new national officers such as the chairman are elected),  at Curve, Leicester (don’t ask why they don’t call it “The Curve”)followed by 2 days of debates, resolutions and exhibition.

Friday after  a very early start, I caught John Allan – the new National Chairman, in our hotel and video interviewed him on the spot – John has some strong views on out of town parking as you’ll see – the video is on the FSB website along with many other videos.

Later in the morning we had an excellent talk by Peter McAvoy of Google – I met him some months ago in Southern Ireland while at an ESBA meeting at Google’s HQ.

He talked about Google’s ideas and in particular, Google Glass which is a fascinating project about to come to fruition and involving micro-miniature circuitry effectively putting the power of a modern mobile into a set of glasses with transparent projection in front of your eyes. The video explains what they’re trying to achieve.

The rest of Friday was taken up with various policy-related talks and we had the RT Hon Vince Cable doing his thing along with other political speakers including the RT Hon Owen Paterson.

The exhibitions included Dell and Microsoft (the latter funded the excellent Friday night drinks reception) as well as the guys from ESBA (European Small Business Alliance) – Saturday saw more of the same culminating in the talk by Toyah Wilcox.

The whole lot is up on the web (I should add that was surrounded by an excellent team of staff and volunteers who’re working hard to make sure this all runs smoothly – but these photos are my own). Here are some more pics from the event.

Hi! You might find this interesting.. it’s not rocket science but plenty of people would argue otherwise.

Have you noticed that NEARLY all garden solar lights have the solar cell FLAT on the top – i.e. not angled to the sun but level. I can only imagine this is for ease of manufacture or style or they’re mainly sold in hot countries where the sun gets high up in the sky.

Either way, not good! You hear people say “ah yes these solar cells work in the shade as well”. The technical term for that is bollocks.

So, here’s the test. I took a typical solar cell (I just happen to have them lying around all over the place) out into the garden this afternoon – just after lunch. Being March in the UK the sun was down near the ankles.

I made sure there were no obstructions and the solar cell was naked – i.e. no glass to add to the confusion. I stuck a meter on the cell and moved it into three positions – firstly JUST out of the sun, secondly in the sun and flat level with the ground and thirdly at 90% to the sun – i.e. pointing at the sun.

Well there it is in plain English… 16ma from the device in the shade, 60ma from the flat device and 100ma from the device when pointing to the sun. The difference is clear and unambiguous.

Put another way… assuming you managed to get the garden light to shine, given the more favourable lighting (3) for, oh, 4 hours at night….. the version with the flat top would only give you 2.4 hours and the one in the shade (only just mind you – I reckon I could have made it give a lot less) would give you 38 minutes at best. Pile more solar cells you get more power – but the ratio remains the same.

I hope that puts that one to rest – there will be minor differences depending on the cell type. Look for garden lights who’s solar cells you can point at typical British sun – set them to the position the sun will be at mid-day – and that’s the best you’re going to get.

Well, that was an interesting week -  starting in Alicante we headed off to our place in Galera for the week, meeting new neighbours and enjoying spending time with friends over there. 

I would not call it a holiday in the sun as the weather was changeable but there’s no comparing it to the miserable cold back here in the Northeast of England.

We got off to a flying start by leaving the keys back in the UK, so we started our holidays with a locksmith and a new set of keys. Our local mountain was covered in snow for most of the week (though by the end of the week it had almost all gone) and the weather went from sunny to overcast.. but that’s about it.

We managed a trip to Baza just for supplies and also the Huescar Thursday market (and a trip to the supermarket for my Russian salad) but nothing special – just a relaxing break away from the cold. The company we use for broadband – Habland – were kind enough to ramp up the speed for the week for a small sum – I leave it on standby speed when we’re not there so that I can check up on the cameras and also leave running a WIFI service called "wifi for you" available for those folk in the area around our place, who don’t have any broadband.

Throughout the week we had a new dog pestering us for a home – just as well we didn’t take him on as his owner turned up at the end to take him away!

The cats however were there in droves as usual, getting more friendly by the day (though FAR from domesticated). On our departure they got our leftovers so by now there will be a very happy group of them.

We departed by way of the journey back to Alicante but leaving WAY before time to give us a few hours to enjoy the beach there which at this time of the year is very pleasant during the day. We stopped off and had pizza for lunch before having a nice walk along the beach.

Our flight to the UK got is in late Saturday night and we arrived back in Wark at around 2am or so – to miserable, freezing conditions, so very, very different to what we left behind in Spain. Still, not too long to go before we’re back for the summertime – 40c – BRING IT ON!!!!

Our friends have planted some trees near our place over in Galera and I’ll be bringing a fresh set of solar lights to make the place look welcoming.

Click on any image to see a larger version.

I was recently asked to trial satellite broadband by a service provider.

In some ways I’m the ideal target for this because despite living in a rural area, I have broadband already – two broadband setups in fact, one is a fully-fledged version, unlimited use but limited in speed to around 6 Mbps download and around 500Kbps upload due to simple BT line limits – that’s pretty much the best we can get out here. I’m also IT-literate so I know what to look for.

Here’s a photo of SpeedTest.net results for my normal main landline broadband.

Not stunning – but that’s rural for you! So that’s my primary landline broadband. The second is from Orange and we only keep it because it is cheap (£5 a month) – it has download limits and so is only really useful as a backup. I use a Draytek 2380 series modem that makes that switchover happen automatically.

Yesterday, the satellite installers arrived at 2pm to fit the equipment – we discussed the best place to put it (flat roof – avoiding trees) and where to put the cable. As it happens I have a hole in my office outside wall for existing cabling so it was a case of maybe 40ft of coax cable from the dish to the receiver box, tidy the cable away – plug in mains power (separate and somewhat larger than normal adaptor) to the receiver and… that was pretty much it. They installed the dish on the roof, wired it up, rang their office for activation and were on their way by 2:40pm (i.e. 40 minutes from start to finish) which is not bad! The installation looked simple enough for anyone to do – the PC showed the signal level and as they adjusted the levels, the signal went up until the point where a large tick appeared on-screen indicating data was flowing both ways (no telephone line involved here)

The dish is about twice the size of a SKY TV dish and they mounted it on the flat end of the sloping roof part of the house – it’s not really in view unless you’re a helicopter or deliberately looking up.

So now, back in my office is a black Tooway modem about the size of a normal modem – it has nothing more than power, input (from the dish) and both RJ45 and USB connectors – one of each. I guess for many people there would then be a requirement for a wireless router – as it stands this particular box feeds one computer only, hardwired. They could have supplied a standard wireless router but I didn’t need it as I already have routers and switches (a fairly complex setup) and I didn’t really want any more hardware lying around.

As it happens, the main ADSL router I use is one of the better Drayteks and has a SECOND input from any internal network source. I simply disconnected the ORANGE (RJ45) input and connected the output from the new Tooway box. As the address allocation is dynamic I didn’t have to change anything else other than telling my router to prioritise satellite only for now – for testing. In short, it worked “out of the box”.

Initial tests simply confirmed what I knew already, the PING is awful – due to the physical distance the system has to travel. One of the installers said it might be over a second but in fact it’s around 750ms (i.e. 0.75 of a second) quite consistently. One could assume that this might be an issue when using conferencing as that’s a measurable delay.. but the speed overall is an improvement on my landline broadband – tests to date are showing up to 9Mbps download (with peaks far higher than that) and around 3Mbps upload – the latter being a great improvement on my main broadband. Multiple tests show a fair bit of variation from test to test.

So how does this work in practice?

As you can see  apart from PING (signal goes from here to satellite – then back down to earth, then up to the satellite then back to me) the performance compares well with plain-vanilla broadband.

The first thing that came to mind was “will this affect Skype calls?” – it would appear not, because soon after installation, I made 2 Skype video calls that were perfectly good – indeed the increased upload speed will be like a breath of fresh air for Skype (think about it – you UPLOAD your sound and video to the other guy so that’s usually a bottleneck). A third Skype call was audio only to a telephone and I thought I detected a slight delay (which makes you more likely to interrupt the other person) – but nothing I could really complain about.

How about the BBC i-Player in HD?  No problem…  watching the data go through the router it peaks at over 9Mbps – and the iPlayer works a treat. YouTube in HD? No problem. The iPlayer requires 3.5Mbps for HD – here’s the test run…

Downloading? A 100Meg file just took around a minute which actually beats the download speed quoted by SpeedTest.

Thinking about it, the most likely area for problems is modern high-speed network games, if someone is firing a gun at you, not finding out for nearly a second is likely to be an issue!! My grandson spent the afternoon on another machine playing World of Warcraft and never even noticed the switchover!

VPNs? Some folk use VPNs to access work data or perhaps to watch TV in foreign country… I’ve tested several and they all work well. Again I would expect this to compound delays but up to now that’s not really been noticeable.

Remote cameras?  Noticeably slower to administer, no doubt due to the simple coding inside them and the likelihood of very small packages going back and forth. I’d say interacting with them is 3-4 times slower than normal broadband. Speed of actually capturing frames seems unaffected.

Facebook, again probably because of large numbers of small packages of data going back and forth, runs more slowly than usual and seems the most affected up to now, but it’s still quite useable.

For me, at this point, the satellite installation generally works fine other than the slight delays. I would not wish to give up the landline but if I had no alternatives I’d be happy and the HD streaming ability is handy. I’ll put more information in here as I gain experience – I don’t know yet if I have a fixed IP address or not on this new service – I’m assuming I do (that might be important for, for example accessing information remotely). If the price is right this could be a good product.

I’ve had an extremely full (and generally exciting) week which has only just finished last night – starting on Tuesday with a series of meetings in London. On Tuesday night I was part of the black-tie FSB annual Chairman’s Dinner -  a grand affair with guests including Vince Cable and George Osborne. Some of the titles were a tad over-powering, spending the early evening talking about gadgets with Carole Van Eyll – First Secretary – Political and Economical Affairs – Embassy of Belgium – how’s that for a mouthful.

Because the FSB was organising this, I had my own table which include amongst others – Robery Oulds of the Bruges Group (who I already knew from previous dinners) and Helen Woolley who is Director General of the Country Land and Business association – a cracking evening which ended up seeing me walking back to the hotel to clear my head!

Wednesday after getting up at 6:30am to go into the London office to edit Vince Cable’s video I was buried away in meetings all day and then first thing on Thursday morning I headed off to Gibraltar as guest of ESBA – the European Small Business Association. The FSB is a member of and key player in ESBA.

I’d never been to Gibraltar before and the schedule was packed but thanks to some extremely good weather and very early starts, that didn’t stop me bagging a boatload of photos of the place – which if you’ve never been before, as I hadn’t, is amazing not least because of it’s history.

The main board meeting was held, wait for it at a stunning meeting room at the very top of the Gibraltar Rock – I have to say, THE most excellent location you could imagine for such a meeting. We arrived by ski-lift but our Chairman and I chose (possible unwisely) the hard way back down – which took us half way around the country (it’s not a very big country) taking in some stunning views along the way but not before stopping to take pictures of the many resident Macaques. At the top of the rock we were warned to hide any plastic bags as they would surely be stolen by the monkeys (£500 fine for feeding them). In one of my many photos, a baby macaque is seen with his mum, cuddling someone’s shoe!

Yesterday, I sat through an excellent presentation on how the organisation uses Microsoft SharePoint as an Intranet – which was one of the main reasons I went in the first place and by lunchtime found myself with some free time, so once again a couple of us took off to check the place out.

I took every opportunity possible to take photos of the trip and most of them are available here. Next time you’re pondering on where to go for a few days holiday, if you’ve not been there already I would strongly recommend a trip to Gibraltar. We spent much of our time in meetings so I’m planning a trip back in the summer with Maureen when we’re at our place in Spain.

Yesterday, I set off first thing in the morning to Newcastle Airport on my way to becoming (representing the Federation of Small Businesses) one of a small team of people from various parts of Europe, discussing small business IT issues in the Dell “Think Tank”, held this morning at the Westergasfabriek in Polonceaukade in Amsterdam.

I was up in the early hours to get to the airport only to find that the plane was slightly delayed but I have to say, KLM are a pretty good bunch and the crew were a very happy bunch.

By 11.30 Amsterdam time my driver was there waiting to take me to the hotel. As we were starting first thing today, they’d put me on a plane the day before and I’m guessing it was just sheer luck that I managed to get half a day out of the deal as many of the guys did not turn up till late last night. A shame, as it turns out most of them seemed a great bunch and I had so little time to get to know everyone.

The hotel was the Renaissance which is only a 10 minute walk from the central rail station and is quite nice apart from their WIFI which at 6 Euros an hour is just simply being greedy. Fortunately as Dell had dragged me over there, they paid for the WIFI. A nice hotel in a convenient spot–and from a previous visit to Amsterdam I had a vague idea of how to find my way around – so once I’d dumped the bags, I was off, armed with camera for a lightning one-man tour of the area. I could not tell you how far I walked but by the time I was done my feet were utterly shot. Sadly there is a LOT of construction going on near the station which is no so good for photography. Thankfully mid-afternoon the weather picked up and so went further afield and I had myself a great time in search of pictures. You can find the full photo album in my Google+ album here.

I didn’t deliberately enter the red light area, it’s just behind the hotel and pretty hard to miss and so on the way to taking the usual cathedral and related pics I took more than my fair share of shop front photos which you’ll see in the album above. They really do like their marijuana.

I had lunch at a local cafe – slice of pizza and a coffee (very pleasant) and then I was off in search of Kodak moments – sadly by tea-time it was getting a tad chilly so I came back to the hotel, had an early dinner and cleared off to bed.

First thing this morning a bunch of us met up in the hotel foyer – and Ben Chai of Lanix introduced himself – he had an advantage over me in that he’s read my blogs – we had a great chat until  Amanda Metti of Axicom arrived to take us to our venue – she did a cracking job of looking after everyone, making sure we knew where to be and when etc. so at 8:30am this morning we all headed off with her to the Westergasfabriek for our “Think Tank” discussion which was really very productive and not at all what I was expecting (from the questions I was expecting the event to be simple a commercial wheeze).

After formal introductions we had a couple of hours talk, filmed, streamed live onto the web and with input from Twitter and other social media though to be honest I’m unaware of anything coming in from those channels as we were all so engrossed in the conversation. I met several great people and will no doubt keep in touch with a few.

We started by defining just what is a small business and the differences between the countries was not that great. We went on to discuss the relevance of technology to SMEs, how best to lever that technology etc. While we were talking a couple of ladies created the most fabulous – how can I describe it, whiteboard/graffiti/word cloud I have ever seen! For reference the company who did this are called CreativeConnection. If you look at my Google album at the whiteboard (larger image) you’ll see the range of subjects covered. Really very interesting and informative. One fellow, David Hathiramani – co-founder of “A Suit That Fits” described his business which started as the world’s first online tailoring company and now has over 30 locations worldwide and that’s largely down to use of technology.

We had lunch at the venue and then our driver took us back to Schiphol airport to go our separate ways.

All in all quite a pleasant couple of days. Next stop Chairman’s dinner, a couple of days of meetings in London and another short trip, this time in Gibraltar as a guest of ESBA, the European Small Business Alliance – looking forward in particular to a talk on Intranets. No doubt I’ll take the camera and just hope it’s not raining.

See the Google+ album for more pics.

This one’s for techies only! The NRF24L01 2.4Ghz transceiver.

So you have your Arduino (single-chip micro with bootloader) or similar (could be a PIC project really but you’d have to understand and re-hash the libraries) up and running and you need two of them to communicate. How do you do it?

One way is the excellent EASYTRANSFER library (just look up ARDUINO EASY TRANSFER) which among other things lets you define 2 wires for serial communication.. the library can let you transfer arbitrary blocks of data back and forth reliably and at speed, but placing that cable can be a pain depending on location and/or the patience of your spouse.

If you need wireless communication at low cost, then perhaps the NRF24L01 modules are for you. I must stress that the really cheap units with PCB aerials do not have a lot of range (ignore the crap people put in print about range – such comments are about as reliable as the ads that claim 96 hours standby on your smartphone – yeah, right).

The problem I found is that there is SO much incorrect or contradictory information out there I decided to write my own blog on the subject.  As I sit here, I have two dissimilar Arduinos (one is a NANO, the other is simply built from scratch on a breadboard, both use the 328 chip, a marvellous if limited device that costs just a few ££s) and I have the two passing messages across to each other reliably – when I say reliably, we’re talking about radio but what I mean is that only accurate information is being sent – you can rely on it within the limits of range of the devices (and the weather and walls and WIFI signals etc.).

Often when radio people write such stuff you get how to send a character across and the rest is left to you on the assumption you know your stuff – well we’re all beginners at SOME point. What I’ll describe here is sending an arbitrary BLOCK OF DATA across – that data can be whatever you want but let’s say a character string like “Hello world” or an integer containing the time – or both.. you might want a wireless display board or weather station etc.… who knows – this will let you send whatever you need to send back and forth.

So, do you need wireless transfer and you’re happy with maybe 20-30ft with no walls or maybe the next room? This article is for you (and if not you might be looking at the same thing with and external aerial so this article is STILL for you).

So firstly lets take a look at the radio hardware. The NRF24L01 radios comprise a unit smaller than your average thumb with either an 8-way or 10 way connection depending on which module you go for – makes no difference, you need in total 7 wires to do the job including power and ground.

The connection details are here and you need the RF24 library – rename it simply to RF24 so the Arduino IDE doesn’t kick up a fuss. There are a couple of variations of this library – mostly unfinished – it’s a shame people take all the time to make a library – put it out there – admit the library has a long way to go – and then forget about it! An example is the RF24SH library – “needs work” – and no updates for a year! What!!?

Gregg Copeland has done mods to the RF24 library but the one I’d check out now is here. He has also done mods to the RF24NETWORK library. http://tmrh20.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/high-speed-data-transfers-and-wireless.html

First thing to note – these unit run on 3.3 volts – and will EXPLODE (slight exaggeration, more like smell for a while then pack in) on 5v so don’t even think about it.  One of them is running on the 3.3v output from the NANO, for the other I simply dropped the 5v supply through 2 4001 diodes – that’s it – you don’t have to worry about the data lines, just don’t feed 5v into the power lead. On reflection (August 2014) the diode dropper wasn’t a good idea – and I’ve recently learned about all sorts of issues with current spikes on these radios so I consider it a MUST to attach a capacitor across the power lines ON the board, a 6.3v 330u cap works for me. Without this expect all manner of strange issues of range.

Using the library I mentioned above (you need the RF24, NOT the MIRF library from that website) you’ll find an example of how to send the time from one board to the other wirelessly… but that leaves SO many questions including how much RAM does this use etc.. well, here are some quick wins for you. The library uses only something like 16 bytes and the chip will retry messages 15 times – if you want more data it’s over to your code. The chip will send and receive it’s own buffer of up to 32 bytes… that is – your code can be doing something else while it’s buffering up 32 characters. Great!

Of course you need to store the data somewhere – if you’re sending you need to store the output buffer, if you’re receiving you need to store the input buffer and in their time example the same code handles both transmitter and receiver, using an Arduino pin to select what job the board is doing (GREAT way to knock up a test). So – I decided to allocate 64 bytes of RAM to this in total – 32 in one direction, 32 in the other. I knew I wanted various types of data so I created a simple STRUCT…

union radpack

{

  byte package[32];

  int myints[16];

  float myfloats[8];

};

radpack radio_in;

radpack radio_out;

So what’s a UNION – you don’t see much about these but they’re dead handy.. a UNION is a block of memory and it’s size is dictated by the largest item in it – they overlap so you can’t use them at the same time – but for a buffer they’re ideal as you don’t then have to do all sorts of conversions depending on the data you need. I could have just used a struct but in this case I wanted to experiment sending different types of data at different times.

In this case, if I wanted to populate RADIO_OUT

buffer with text I might simply do this…

    strcpy((char *)radio_out.package,"Peter calling breadboard.......");

So, look at the example in the RF24 library which lets you bounce the time back and forward between two modules –  and then instead of sending the time –  send this data… if you look at the library example you’ll see where this belongs…

 bool ok = radio.write( &radio_out, 32);

You’re sending the address of the union (block of data) and it’s size (32 bytes in this case – note the reference to 32 above – that tells radio.write how much data I’m sending – and remember the chip’s internal buffer will handle no more than 32 bytes at once – if you want more, send more than once package one after the other – but remember you’ll have to buffer that too and the Arduino with 328 only has 1K of RAM IN TOTAL). You could send less if you don’t need that much but I figured as the chip is capable of processing 32 bytes and I needed to send text – why not.   It might be that I’d want to send a bunch of integers …. same send code but populating as:

radio_out.myints[0]=456;

radio_out.myints[2]=1;

radio_out.myfloats[0]=56.45;

// etc

In the note above I’m referring to the UNION – don’t use all it’s innards at the same time as they overlap each other and are merely a convenience for you.

So assuming you got the demo running sending time back and forth, now you have the information to send arbitrary data up to 32 bytes at a time – you might use that to make a wireless message board using a 16 character by 2 line display (but remember- there’s a zero on the end of C strings so you’d only be able to send a pair of 15 byte messages unless you then later added a zero in your own buffer).

Update August 2014: Elsewhere you’ll find information on the RF24NETWORK – this works well but has a strange numbering system – an alternative is the RADIOHEAD network – but beware – the latter has a full mesh network option – tried that – had varying results until I realised that the NRF24L01 chips do not have any means of detecting signal strength – which begs the question – how does the network know how to pick the strongest signals! I went for the intermediate option with that library and defined the nodes and their connections manually. At the time of writing I’m still having reliability problems with the large (NRF24L01+PA) radio modules but the little cheap ones work just fine.

I did a short video on this showing this in action at the end..

This article is part of a chain or articles which started back early 2012 with my cottage thermostat article. How things change. This was followed up by the original UberBareBoard article detailing a 328-based Arduino clone. The next article after this is called home control over the Internet.

by Peter Scargill

I remember a couple of years ago, about this time – I was stuck in the house for a week due to horrendous snow. Here’s a reminder of it… great fun for cats, not much fun for the rest of us.

Well, despite warnings, we got about an inch of snow this morning which then immediately disappeared – meanwhile we’ve had lots of fog which makes for interesting photos. Here’s a couple of shots I took at the weekend nearby (below).

So for all our complaining it’s no-where near as bad as a couple of years ago.. unless you really hate fog.

Onto my third FSB-meeting-fest day in Blackpool and after an early evening last night, an early start this morning. Knowing I’d be spending the rest of the day in a stuffy room full of directors where we mull over serious stuff for hours and hours, I got up first thing and went out with the camera.

Southern Blackpool was enjoying freezing weather and fog in the early hours which made for a kind of surreal atmosphere, made even more strange by the constant sound of seagulls in the distance. Can’t manage the sound here but I hope my pics convey the really interesting atmosphere first thing.